Japan
Until the Fukushima accident, Japan had 55 operating nuclear reactors as well as enrichment and reprocessing plants which had suffered a series of deadly accidents at its nuclear facilities resulting in the deaths of workers and releases of radioactivity into the environment and surrounding communities. Since the Fukushima disaster, there is growing opposition against re-opening those reactors closed for maintenance.
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June 25, 2011 Over 25 years since it exploded and caught fire, the Australian television program Sixty Minutes on June 6, 2011 revisited the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine to learn the lessons about radioactivity's hazards for application in Japan, downwind and downstream of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe.
June 25, 2011 The Japan Atomic Energy Agency has successfully removed a 3.3 ton fuel loading device from precariously near its Monju experimental plutonium breeder reactor's (picture at left) core, Reuters reports. The move was quite risky, in that Monju's 1,600 tons of liquid metal sodium coolant is violently reactive upon contact with water or air. A fire involving the 1.4 tons of ultra-hazardous plutonium fuel in the reactor's core could be catastrophic. Just such a liquid sodium leak took place in 1995, shutting the $12 billion plant until spring 2010. Then the fuel loading device drop accident happened in August. The 20 year old facility has only generated electricity for one hour thus far in the past two decades. Given public concern over the ongoing Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, pressure may force the local and prefectural governments to not approve Monju's eventual restart. The article above reports that Monju was named after the Buddhist god of wisdom -- a most ironic, even blasphemous choice. But then again, the U.S. nuclear establishment code-named its first plutonium bomb "Trinity," and India code-named its first nuclear detonation "Smiling Buddha." This risky "surgery" was only carried out because JAEA wants to re-start Monju. The extraction could have been avoided if further operations at the reactor are simply disallowed, and the problem-plagued facility shut down for good. See Thom Hartmann's interview with Kevin Kamps on Monju a couple postings below.
June 23, 2011 
The federal government of Japan has transmitted a 750 page report to the International Atomic Energy Agency as part of an IAEA Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Safety, being held at the IAEA's headquarters in Vienna, Austria from June 20 to 24. Although called "preliminary," the report represents the single most comprehensive assessment compiled by the Japanese government since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe began on March 11th. An overview summarizes the report's main findings. It must be borne in mind that the IAEA's schizophrenic mandate is to promote nuclear energy as "atoms for peace," while also preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Given that fatally flawed internal contradiction, risks of atomic energy often get downplayed, to put it mildly. For example, a 1957 "Memorandum of Understanding" between the IAEA and World Health Organization gives the IAEA an effective veto over WHO on any radiation health related matter, leading to such outrages as IAEA/WHO maintaining for 20 (1986 to 2006) years that just a few dozen people had died from Chernobyl's radioactivity releases (in 2006, IAEA/WHO upped the figure to 4,000, still far below Alexey Yablokov's figure of nearly a million deaths due to Chernobyl between 1986 and 2004). It should not be surprising, then, that IAEA has invoked secrecy on its Fukushima nuclear catastrophe meeting (see Bloomberg article)!
June 23, 2011 
Thom Hartmann of "The Big Picture" on RT TVBeyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps appeared on the Big Picture with Thom Hartmann at RT TV to discuss the risks of attempts to remove a 3.3 ton object accidentally dropped precariously close to the core of the Monju experimental plutonium breeder reactor in Japan. In addition, Thom and Kevin discussed the latest on the flooding risks at Nebraska's Fort Calhoun and Cooper atomic reactors along the historic swell on the Missouri River.
June 21, 2011 The New York Times has reported that the Japanese government's Atomic Energy Agency will try yet again to dislodge a 3.3 ton object accidently dropped onto Monju's core last August, despite the high risks inherent with the reactor's volatile and toxic plutonium, as well as ultra-reactive liquid sodium coolant, inventories (1.4 tons, and 1,600 tons, respectively). Both Citizens Nuclear Information Center Tokyo, and the Council of the People of Fukui Prefecture Against Nuclear Power, are quoted, warning, as they have for decades, against Monju's many risks. The experiment, twenty years old, with a price tag of $12 billion and counting, has thus far produced electricity for a grand total of one hour.
